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Strange to think that, without Daniel Ellsberg, Watergate might never have happened, Richard Nixon might have remained president, and the war in Vietnam might have taken even longer to end. So many decades later, it's easy to forget how, in June 1971, when Ellsberg released those secret government documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, and their shocking revelations about that distant war hit the front page of the New York Times, Nixon and crew were determined to move against him -- and fast. It mattered not at all that he would be "indicted on 12 felony counts, including theft and violation of the Espionage Act," and face up to 115 years in prison. That wasn't enough for them. Nixon wanted to "try him in the press" and turned to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate him.
As it happened, though, Hoover was a buddy of Louis Marx, the father of Ellsberg's wife and the head of a major toy company that, among other things, made plenty of toy soldiers. (Marx regularly gave Hoover toys that he could turn over to his employees for their kids at Christmas.) So when the FBI chief moved far too slowly on Ellsberg, Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, worrying about those Pentagon Papers revelations (even though they didn't deal with Nixon's own nightmarish role in the then-ongoing wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), decided to set up a White House Special Investigations Unit. It came to be known informally as "the Plumbers."
Its first assignment would be to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in search of damaging information on him. (No luck, as it turned out, but when the judge in Ellsberg's trial found out about that break-in, he dismissed the case.) Nine months later, that unit's ultimate assignment would, of course, have nothing to do with Ellsberg. It would be the infamous break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in -- yes! -- the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. The result was history that would have been inconceivable without -- yes! -- Daniel Ellsberg.
As TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon, author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, makes clear today, Ellsberg led quite a life thereafter before dying in June 2023. Let him rest in peace. (If only the rest of this planet could do the same!) Tom
The Absence -- and Presence -- of Daniel Ellsberg
A Year After His Death, He's Still with Us
On a warm evening almost a decade ago, I sat under the stars with Daniel Ellsberg while he talked about nuclear war with alarming intensity. He was most of the way through writing his last and most important book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Somehow, he had set aside the denial so many people rely on to cope with a world that could suddenly end in unimaginable horror. Listening, I felt more and more frightened. Dan knew what he was talking about.
After working inside this country's doomsday machinery, even drafting nuclear war plans for the Pentagon during President John F. Kennedy's administration, Dan Ellsberg had gained intricate perspectives on what greased the bureaucratic wheels, personal ambitions, and political messaging of the warfare state. Deceptions about arranging for the ultimate violence of thermonuclear omnicide were of a piece with routine falsehoods about American war-making. It was easy enough to get away with lying, he told me: "How difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: it's not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you're often telling them what they would like to believe -- that we're better than other people, we're superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world."
Dan had made history in 1971 by revealing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, exposing the constant litany of official lies that accompanied the U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War. In response, the government used the blunderbuss of the World War I-era Espionage Act to prosecute him. At age 41, he faced a possible prison sentence of more than 100 years. But his trial ended abruptly with all charges dismissed when the Nixon administration's illegal interference in the case came to light in mid-1972. Five decades later, he reflected: "Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle."
That miracle enabled Dan to keep on speaking, writing, researching, and protesting for the rest of his life. (In those five decades, he averaged nearly two arrests per year for civil disobedience.) He worked tirelessly to prevent and oppose a succession of new American wars. And he consistently gave eloquent public support as well as warm personal solidarity to heroic whistleblowers -- Thomas Drake, Katharine Gun, Daniel Hale, Matthew Hoh, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Mordechai Vanunu, Ann Wright, and others -- who sacrificed much to challenge deadly patterns of official deceit.
Unauthorized Freedom of Speech
Dan often spoke out for freeing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, whose work had revealed devastating secret U.S. documents on America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the end of a visit in June 2015, when they said goodbye inside Ecuador's embassy in London, I saw that both men were on the verge of tears. At that point, Assange was three years into his asylum at that embassy, with no end in sight.
Secretly indicted in the United States, Assange remained in the Ecuadorian embassy for nearly four more years until London police dragged him off to prison. Hours later, in a radio interview, Dan said: "Julian Assange is the first journalist to be indicted. If he is extradited to the U.S. and convicted, he will not be the last. The First Amendment is a pillar of our democracy and this is an assault on it. If freedom of speech is violated to this extent, our republic is in danger. Unauthorized disclosures are the lifeblood of the republic."
Unauthorized disclosures were the essence of what WikiLeaks had published and what Dan had provided with the Pentagon Papers. Similarly, countless expose's about U.S. government war crimes became possible due to the courage of Chelsea Manning, and profuse front-page news about the government's systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment resulted from Edward Snowden's bravery. While gladly publishing some of their revelations, major American newspapers largely refused to defend their rights.
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